How Important Is Robust LMS Reporting For Training Companies
As a training company, having an LMS (Learning Management System) can be a great move for your business, as it allows you to offer eLearning to your students. However, it can also be a great move for another reason—reporting!
Reporting on all aspects of your business is really important because it means you can get an overview of how every part is performing, as well as getting vital data on how your students and your classes are doing.
Therefore, it’s important to make sure your LMS not only offers a great eLearning experience for your students but also provides you with the reporting capabilities you need to effectively measure your training!
Let’s take a look at some of the key things you should be able to do with LMS reporting as a training company below:
Track Your Students’ Progression
Unlike classroom sessions where you and your team will have quite a lot of contact with your students, eLearning will see the students mostly left to themselves, unless there is the odd classroom session or an assessment which they need to complete. This means you may not always be aware of the progress of all your students at any given moment, as everyone will be progressing at different rates as well.
A reporting system within your LMS will allow you to see exactly where all your students are in their courses, and how much work they still have left to do. This means if a student stays stuck on a topic for a little while, it may mean they’re having trouble with the course content, and this will give you the chance to reach out to them and see if you can help.
It also means if students only have access to courses for a set amount of time, you can see who has actually completed the courses as their access comes to an end. You can then alert them to the fact they only have a set amount of time left to complete their training, or they will no longer have access.
Finally, if your students have assessments coming up, you can also ensure that all your students have completed all the necessary eLearning in advance of the assessment, and will, therefore, be able to set it.
Track Scores
Being able to see the scores your students are getting on your eLearning courses is important because you want to make sure that they are passing to a high standard, as lots of fail marks could mean there is something wrong with the content of your course. Spotting a pattern like this early will give you time to go back to your content and review it, making any changes that you think need to be made along the way.
As we mentioned above, this a great way to offer your students support when they need it. If they are able to try and pass your eLearning classes as many times as they like while they have access to it, you can look at working together with them to make sure they pass on any future attempts if they didn’t get the score they were hoping for the first time.
Track Popularity Of Classes
Being able to report on which classes students are signing up for is handy for a few reasons, and your LMS reporting system should be able to help you get all this data:
- Which classes are signed up for the most often?
If you have classes that are really popular and always have a high attendance rate, these may be the ones you want to focus on the most when it comes to improving the content and making sure it is always as up-to-date as possible. - Which classes are a bit neglected?
At the other end of the scale, it’s always important to look at which classes aren’t getting very many students signing up for them. You may not want to waste lots of time and money updating content for eLearning courses that very rarely have people signing up for them. In fact, if you have some classes which are under-attended quite often you may decide to get rid of them from your course catalog altogether, as it’s not worth spending time marketing them. - Do your training courses always get finished?
Not everyone who signs up for your training is going to finish their course. It’s important to look at where people have stopped learning with you and see if there is anything you can do on your side to help people complete their journey with you. Sometimes life just gets in the way and things slip, but if you have lots of people abandoning a course on a certain module, it could be that the content is too confusing or difficult, and your students are getting discouraged from continuing with you. As we said above, being able to spot this sort of problem early will give you the chance to fix it, review your content, and hopefully get your students to complete their training with you.
Track When Training Needs Topped Up
A lot of training is a one-off affair, but sometimes training will need to be topped up or retaken after a certain period of time to ensure that the qualification remains valid, and the student is up-to-speed on the latest version.
Seeing which students completed which training courses, and when they completed it with you, will allow you to see when students need to top-up their qualification. This will allow you to get in touch with them, and remind them that their qualification is about to expire, which will hopefully encourage them to sit the training with you again. This can be a great quick win for your Marketing team as all they need to do is refer to the date on the report which will be generated for them!
Combine eLearning Numbers With Classroom Numbers
The ideal situation when it comes to reporting would be to easily combine all the stats and figures for any training sessions you run. This includes eLearning, classroom-based sessions, and blended learning.
If you currently use or are in the market for a Training Management System (TMS), combining your TMS and your LMS into one product could be the perfect solution to this problem. That way all your class information would be stored in the same place, no matter how the class is delivered, and when you produce reports on your classes for a certain time period everything would be included.
This will allow you to create a complete picture of your business when you produce your reports, instead of having to worry about how you’re going to combine different data from different systems.
